


On the Other Hand

by Seiberwing



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Coldwaveweek2016, Communication Solves Everything, Episode: s01e07 Marooned, Fix-It, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 05:26:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6502414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiberwing/pseuds/Seiberwing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mick had told Len to pick a side. And their gazes had met, lingered across the hallway as pirates streamed past Mick with their weapons raised, and Len had twisted around to fire his gun into Sarah’s gut, and that had been it.</p><p>“So what’s the plan, partner? Now that we’ve got them trusting us?””</p><p>“This <i>was</i> the plan.” </p><p>(Written as part of Coldwave Week 2016.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Other Hand

**Author's Note:**

> I absolutely swear that I wrote this before the whole handfreezy thing in "Left Behind", the title was not meant as a foreboding pun. But let's pretend it was. Also all the pirates are somewhat French because why not.
> 
> Written for Day 1 (and then also Day 2) of Coldwave Week 2016 on Tumblr.

Mick had told Len to pick a side. And their gazes had met, lingered across the hallway as pirates streamed past Mick with their guns raised, and Len had twisted around to fire his gun into Sarah’s gut, and that had been it.

“So what’s the plan, partner? Now that we’ve got them trusting us?””

“This was the plan.” Mick sounded exhausted. They were staring out into the void, shoulders almost touching as time pirates wandered the hallways making repairs and arguing over who got to keep Rip’s stuff. The pirates had made short work of the rest of the team after Mick opened the doors for them. The cold gun had put Sarah down long enough for her to be taken down, and the narrow corridors hadn’t given Kendra enough room to maneuver before they’d shot holes in her wings. Ray apparently was down for the count before they got there, probably didn’t even know they’d lost the ship yet.“ Trade the Waverider and these bastards for a chance to go home, forget all this shit.”

Len’s head turned a fraction to the side, eying both Mick and Mick’s reflection in the glass. Like watching a snake, Mick mused, that casual curiosity backed by fangs. “You aren’t going to tell me that you genuinely sold us out,” he murmured.

Mick’s voice was rough and low, like the whisper of an engine about to roar. “Sold them out. You, I gave a chance. Not that you deserved it.” Mick’s tongue lapped a fleck of dried blood from his lip. They’d beaten him to shit, and Mick had stayed on his knees and taken it. Like he’d taken that beating from Savage. And from the Russians. And from the gulag guards. And from Len, the one person who should have known never to do that to him. And who the hell on the team had so much as cared what was happening to Mick, unless he was making too much trouble for their taste.

“I’m sick of taking orders off a British asshole who it turns out didn’t want me here in the first place, and I’m not planning on dying out here in the dark.” Out in the void Mick could see the stars as barely-visible pinpricks that he knew were supposed to be gigantic balls of fire so huge that the Earth would be a stray fleck of dirt against the massive light in the moment before the fire swallowed it completely. 

Which still sounded nicer than being stuck in a cell with Rip Hunter.

“Who told you that he didn’t want you here?”

“He did. Said I had the IQ of meat. Said he never wanted some unstable crazy out here to begin with, he only took me because we were a ‘package deal’.” Mick hissed the last two words out through his teeth. 

Len rolled his eyes. “Rip’s an idiot. If we’ve learned one thing on this wild ride, it’s that a half-dead baby raccoon would be better at planning than Rip Hunter.”

“Then why are you still on his side instead of mine? You want the bragging points for taking out Savage, and the bastard’ll probably hand those over to you on a platter, but he’s never gonna give those to me. He thinks I’m your sidekick. No one here respects me. And you, I thought you used to respect me, and that you’d want to be somewhere where other people were respecting me too, but apparently I was wrong.”

He was raising his voice enough that a passing pirate was staring at them. Mick gave him a returning gaze of ‘I am just done enough with reality to set all of you on fire regardless of consequences’, and the man quickly went on his way.

When Mick turned back Len had his head down. “Mick, the place was a warzone. No running water, no TV, and eventually you’d run out of things to burn if the place hadn’t already eaten you alive.”

“Yeah. So you coldcocked me and yanked me out of there because I was too stupid to take care of myself, so you had to make my decisions for me.” The reality-done-fire-now gaze was turned on Len now, but Len met it and held it.

“No. Because I couldn’t deal with leaving you behind twice.”

“Eh?”

Len’s shoulders rose and fell in a slow shrug, like a wave coming in and going out. “I’m a criminal. I’m greedy, and I’m selfish, and I want what other people don’t want me to have. Usually that’s money or jewels. This time, it was you. Once we finish this and go back to 2016, the timeline will change, and I’d never have been able to get back to where you were. Wherever that might be.” Who the hell knew where timelines went when they died. “Yeah, Rip’s an idiot. If Rip wasn’t an idiot, maybe he’d ask why you were my deal breaker.”

Mick’s eyebrows, or what was left visible of them between the bruises and the blood, went up. “What?”

Len nodded. “Yeah, I was the only one he wanted. That part’s true. He said he needed a thief with a gentler touch, one who was good enough to have beaten the Flash a few times but never much cared to take him down for good.” You could hear the unspoken ‘what, like it’s hard?’ at the end of the sentence. “Like I did it because I had a conscience. Rip wanted someone calm, because he thinks calm is the same thing as obedient. But I told him I wasn’t coming on his little time machine adventure unless I could bring you with me.”

Len raised his hand, thumb up and two fingers pointing straight ahead at the glass. They’d stripped the both of them of their weapons, in a move Mick didn’t find entirely unreasonable if it hadn’t been his gun, but he’d been promised it back. Later. If he and Len behaved.

“I only need one hand to fire a gun.” Len raised the other. “But I’m not going to have a lot of success doing anything else without two of them. I talked you into this mess because I wanted to be out here, but I didn’t want to be out here without you. I’m the one who can cool you down, but you’re the one who charges me up.”

Len lowered the ‘gun’, and that smirk that Mick would normally follow into hell itself faded. “But you want out, you want out. One good arm seemed to work out all right for ‘Oliver’ back there. Just as long as you’re somewhere I can find you again.”

Fuck, Len. Why’d you have to turn this into feelings talk? I hate feelings talk.

“Why don’t we both get out?” Mick suggested, offering the same shrug in as manly a fashion as he could.

“Because this is…I want this.” Len gestured to the stars. “This score, this thing bigger than a bank heist. It’s like beating the Flash—I want to do something no one else has been able to do, ever, before or after our time. And I like some of these people.” He stressed the “some”, very hard, because admitting to liking Rip Hunter would be grounds for nuking the friendship entirely. 

Even then, Mick was still frowning at him.“Really.”

“I like Sarah. Reminds me a lot of Lisa. Reminds me a little of you. She’s our kind of party. And Jax is…Jax is all right. Jax has potential. That rich boy, though—”

“Rich boy’s got potential too,” Mick interrupted “Just someone needs to beat the stupid out of him. Tougher than he looks.”

“Kendra’s not as much of a drag now that her not-soulmate’s gone off to reincarnate.”

“And Jax is a lot more impressive when Stein’s riding shotgun on him as Firestorm. The egghead knew how to party forty years ago, at least.”

“And Rip is…” They held a moment of silence as they considered positive aspects of Rip Hunter. 

“Rip knows how to drive the Waverider,” Len finally decided, and that would have to be enough. The silence lingered again as the stars moved across a backdrop so dark that it sucked your gaze in, until it became impossible to turn away.

Then Mick raised his voice, loud enough to be heard down the hall in the control room. “You guys got this trashbucket working yet?”

The captain, whose name was something like ‘Lefu’ with a few odd and unwanted vowels stuck in the middle to make it confusing, stuck his head out the door. “His AI says it won’t listen to anyone but the crew. And not to you or ‘Mr. Snart’, either, it sounds like Rip didn’t trust you even before you wised up and came around to us. Klizzy’s about to start working her way through Rip’s fingers.”

“Great. Don’t get started until I get there.” Mick looked to Len, and Len shrugged. He had a plan. Of course he had a plan. But this was Mick’s show. This time, he trusted Mick to get the job done right.

“So Gideon’ll still listen to the rest of them.” Mick gave a nod, looking considering. “I got a thought, assuming you save one of those fingers for me.”

The pirate tilted his head, ready to listen.

“Two weeks ago Rip got my ass locked up in a Russian gulag, circa the Cold War. He wouldn’t have cared to get me out again either if they didn’t have the old man locked up there too, with information Rip didn’t want the Russians to have. The Russians tortured me and tortured Ray, the idiot in the infirmary, but Stein didn’t crack. I’m not even sure he flinched.”

“Jacq said the old man’s a stone cold killer,” commented Lefu.

“Jacq would,” said the voice of someone unseen but clearly Done With Jacq’s Shit.

“But then the Russians brought in his kid and—“” Mick snapped his fingers. “Crumpled up like an eggshell. The Russians gave it to the kid good, too, just to make sure Stein wasn’t lying to them. Stein hasn’t let on to you that Jax is even his son, I’m guessing, because he’s shit scared of it happening again.”

“He’s been having nightmares about it,” Len put in. Supportive, not going too far. “Strained the relationship real bad.”

“You give Stein a minute alone with Jax, let him have a good hard hug together to soften him up, and then you yank Jax out and poke him a few times with something sharp and rusty, Stein’ll hand over the keys real fast. And then poke him a few more times, for me.”

The pirate leader nodded to him, smiling in that way that a bastard appreciated other bastards. “Cold, Mr. Rory. Cold but smart. Are you sure you two don’t want to stick with us? It’ll be a lot better than running around in the twenty-first century.”

A matching lazy smile went across Mick’s face and Len could practically see the lights dancing in his eyes. This might all end in tears but at least it would end in fire. They’d end it Mick’s way.

“Nah. I’ve got what I need already.”


End file.
